Unethical practice - What is this site doing?

[corinaw]

Hi Webmasterworld,
A 27,000 page almost totally empty directory of seattle businesses just bumped us for most of our regionally specific keywords. (We are a service biz, they are a directory of services)

I was checking the directory backlinks and I noticed that many of the 27,100 pages containing the url come from very strange sites.

The sites linking to this directory originate from "example.com" but there are multiple variations of numbers and chars in front of the domain making it appear unique such as "1234example.com"

The strange sites pages are not cached, they show the businesses that are paying to be included in the directory, the biz links are coded in java, and when you click them you are redirected to an ad on another site. The link of the directory that bumped us is only in the SE url string, not the java redirect. The pages all refresh every 60 seconds.

I'm thinking something is not right. Could this be harming the businesses included in this directory (they are paying for inclusion by the way), or could this possibly be helping the fairly empty directory improve its ranking?

Okay, I'm not 27000 pages- but my site's content is real, fairly substantial (200 pgs) and adds value. I don't understand how a mostly empty directory of duplicated pages is ranking higher than we do. Any insight would be appreciated.

Thanks

[edited by: physics at 9:41 pm (utc) on June 15, 2005]
[edit reason] oops, no specific domain names please ... use example.com instead [/edit]

[JAB Creations]

Google has a thing against new websites and I think possibly new pages. Having 27K links pointing to your site seems like a seriously twisted attempt at something.

Search engines will also not crawl large websites or areas of websites that are large. For example I have a couple matrix galleries with several hundred images. The pages are all the same except for numbers. You can not find a large portion of those pages as the search engines either assume or just plain don't care to index them and I'm sure for one good reason or another.

[physics]

Hi corinaw, welcome to WebmasterWorld.com!
Sorry that your first post got put on hold but at WebmasterWorld.com we ask that you don't post specific domain names, even if they aren't yours. Please review the Terms of Service [webmasterworld.com] for more info. And again, welcome!

[physics]

Regarding your question it sounds like their inbound links, however strange/spammy they seem, are boosting their rankings over yours. While it sounds like you have quality content it seems like you might need more links to beat the new competition.
Since their pages are not cached it's also possible they are cloaking and showing more optimized pages to the spiders.
I don't think this can hurt the businesses they are linking to but it probably isn't helping them if there's a javascript redirect and/or the links aren't being shown in the cloaked page.

[corinaw]

I just wanted to update you on this post.

I reported the site info to google, and within 12 hours the domain was removed from the index and all of the spam backlinks disappeared. Pretty impressive turnaround if you ask me. Thanks for your help.